Data Center Development and Environmental Health Across Wisconsin

Community advisory boards throughout Wisconsin have been organizing to address the environmental and health threats that massive data centers bring to our neighborhoods and rural communities. Residents in areas where these industrial facilities have been proposed or built are connecting with each other across the state to share experiences and develop strategies to protect our communities, families, and natural resources.

Through community meetings, environmental monitoring, and resident health surveys across different Wisconsin communities, the board have been documenting how data centers would affect daily life for families, from skyrocketing electricity bills as these facilities drain power grid to concerns about well water depletion, increased truck traffic, and constant noise from cooling systems running 24/7. The community assessments show that residents in urban and rural areas alike are facing similar struggles: being promised economic benefits that may not materialize while bearing the real costs of environmental damage.

Community members from small towns, farming areas, and urban neighborhoods have reported shared experiences: discovering that proposed data centers will use as much electricity as entire cities, worrying about impacts on local water supplies during droughts, dealing with increased air pollution from backup diesel generators, and feeling shut out of decision-making processes that will permanently change their communities. These common concerns across different types of Wisconsin communities show that residents everywhere need to work together to demand real community control over these developments.

The community advisory approach centers the voices of residents who will live with the long-term consequences of these industrial facilities because the board knows that families breathing the air, drinking the water, and paying the utility bills are the real experts on what our communities need. By connecting communities across Wisconsin, the board is seeking to demand that corporate profits don't come at the expense of our health and environment.

The CAB believes that Wisconsin communities deserve to control their own futures and that any development should genuinely benefit local residents rather than extracting resources while leaving the residents with pollution, higher costs, and health risks.

Please go through each of the activities below and share your thoughts about data center development in Wisconsin!